It looks like a news story about a horrific disease that one of your friends have shared on Facebook. Perhaps it even seems that the story is written by a known media outlet. But there is good reason to why warning lights should go off if you see it.

The "news story", often entitled something like 'Exotic disease spreads throughout Europe', is not an article by a known media as it may look like. The link sends you on to what looks like a Facebook login page - and there ask for your username and password. It's a phishing attempt.

If you fill in this, you give away access to your Facebook profile - and suddenly it's you who share links to the fake article, explains IT security expert at CSIS, Peter Kruse.

- If you have entered the user information on the fake login page, you have to hurry to change your password on Facebook.

And if you see that a friend has shared the link on Facebook, it is because your friend has entered the information - and thus given the criminals access to his/hers profile.

Peter Kruse calls the work behind the fake links particularly cunning because they seem to point towards mainstream media sites, and therefore do not look suspicious.

If you are curious to know what the background for the apparent sick hand that figures on the fake articles is, then you can watch this Youtube video. It tells of a young woman who used make-up to get the hand to look like that.

A man pretending to be a three-star U.S. Army general wanted to impress a woman when he unexpectedly landed in a chartered helicopter at the headquarters of a North Carolina technology company, where security officers actually saluted him.

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